oh, what a day

i'm off from lexington and have safely arrived in manhattan, kansas, which is place of about 45000 people and a bunch of kansas state university students. i got to know lil sanya, my sweet and very, very wild two year-old cousin, who after some shy time warmed up and by now has not only learned my name but also announced that from now on she'll be sleeping in my bed.
i've driven. a tractor. pictures have been taken so that i'll be able to prove things to you once i get them. wow. i haven't driven a car in years, but who cares: now i can officially state: i can drive a tractor.

yesterday morning i got soaked twice before leaving for the airport. kentucky rains never cease to amaze me, even though it has been raining there for quite a while now. they're not just rains like in water falling from the sky in small bits. they give you the feeling of walking through a waterfall. i got soaked walking with an umbrella, actually. not quite as soaked as i might have got otherwise, but still soaked.

those last few days in lex were wild. we had very little sleep. we tried to compensate for that by drinking beer. all in all a mind-altering combo, especially when you get to bed at four a.m. and have to sit in class at nine. apparently this does not exactly help to stay all good and healthy, so i'm still in a foggy state of mind. but maybe also, because it is a little surreal being here in the us with people i normally see about 9 time zones away from here.

my flight here was pleasant, i slept through most of it, although it was very weird getting on the plane in lex and literally getting out twenty minutes later in cincinnati, like getting on a tram or a bus. no discussions about my whereabouts this time, in fact they did not check my documents at all - do they do that on german domestic flights? i'm not sure.

so. now i'm hanging out in kansas, and after going through half of it by car i can only say that it's really, really pretty. there is almost nothing there, besides cows and grassy hills, but the grass has sort of a reddish shade to it, they call them the enflamed hills. pretty, really pretty.
my grandma has not noticed my eyebrow piercing so far. yay. or maybe she is only pretending not to have noticed it, that's quite possible, too - one way or the other: no discussions on that part. so far.

i miss the fellow lexingtonians. if any of you read this: i had a great time with all of you and i hope to meet you all again at some point. i mean, in the end these days it's only a couple of hours away,
right...

i have to go now. have a good day everybody, dear fulbrighters, let me know if you arrived well!

one more thing

autumn has arrived
it's starting to colour the tips of the leaves in all colours and the air feels differently - i always smell autumn before i can see it. i love autumn. it's my favourite time of the year.

even though for now it still is hot, i believe that as i move on further north i will see a beautiful fall this year.
love it.

when there's nothing left to say

now time is running by extremely fast - there's only about one week left in kentucky and of course this is the time when I get to know the greatest people and figure out which places are worthy going to and which not, and isn't it ironic.... a little too ironic...?

after pimping myself with loads of aspirin complex and alka seltzer (doesn't work half as good) because the airconditioning had finally got me and had brought me a nice cold with headache and sleeping fourteen hours a day and such on sunday, on tuesday we went to al's bar to listen to rock music. that was cool, and there was beer, that was just equally cool.

yesterday we had a ridiculous number of events coming up on our schedule, one of them being the "oktoberfest" in the german house - i must admit: i was wrong. some of the german house folks are fun and fun to hang out with, which i did afterwards after trivia.

today was my second last real class here, and now it seems very odd and just simply not right to leave next week - i mean, where did the other four weeks go? i guess it is the moment you realize that you can name all of the upcoming events until you leave - i have to sleep less to spend as much awake time here as i can - that you also realize wow, this is it, the time has gone, just gone.

actually it's amazing that people even bother to spend so much time with us, as if we were staying, as if we were to be around forever.
i wonder if something like that would ever happen in germany.
probably not.

the last week that is now to come offers a broad variety of eventy -some of which i dig, but some of which i could easily do without: football match louisville - uk this coming saturday. i tried to talk myself out of the thing, wouldn't work. *******

tomorrow we're going on a river cruise. the last experience i had with cruises was in tenth grade, we had drunk way too much the day before and hence were extremely dehydrated, and the cruise in the burning sun at 35°C was certainly not a pleasant experience. i guess i'm still traumatized.

our esl teacher demands perfection on (or in?) prepositions from bliss and me. i do not feel exactly motivated to sit down and study wordbound preps all day long. in fact, i hate learning them because the process of that is so stupid and monotonous.

but i guess, all of that are just the small things left over to write about in here - there's nothing really new going on once you get settled somewhere, so i guess, this might even be my last entry from ky - although, no, wait, it has just come back to my mind that i had promised you to upload pics of the stadium. well, i'll try to at least bring my camera to the game... and cards and a book, cause that's our big plan. my big plan, at least. cards and a book.

thank you!

hello everybody -
wow, i'm amazed. i got so much awesome feedback on that prose-poem, that's overwhelming, really, i would never have guessed you people would like my stuff that much - thank you all, really, thanks!

this reaction encouraged me to upload some more of my stuff, only not here as not to overkill anyone with poetry-spam who is not interested in that kind of thing at all: please visit my new (second) blog anna schreibt and read into my stuff. i'm afraid most of it is in german, but at least there is a second prose poem in english and it's pretty long, too, so it might be worth taking a little glance at it ;)

of course this blog will be kept up in the same way as previously.

what it all comes down to

after three weeks of school
and campus and fast food
after three weeks of getting to
know new
people new
culture new lifestyles new all
after three weeks of time difference of not
being home and not
seeing those who love und who know you
after three weeks of having the same conversations all over
hello where’re you from Germany that’s awesome where in Germany never heard of it gotta go have a good one
after three weeks of knowing that we’d leave soon enough too soon much too
soon
after three weeks of making friends but not making coffee
of being taken care of no matter what comes up
of not having to go grocery shopping
of learning to order at starbucks and to
customize
everything
cause everyone customizes
everything here
after three weeks of eating burritos and drinking soda and
three weeks of free refills and all you can eat
of blue shirts are everywhere and identification
with school
country state
sports
of trying to figure out the shortest ways to faraway buildings on campus
of trying to figure out the shortest ways to faraway buildings off campus
of trying to figure out the shortest ways to making real friends
and let us
be honest: who would we want to build up friendships with
if we knew they were leaving soon enough much too
soon
after three weeks of being in a group of twenty that feels like you’d known them forever for years but surely not
for three weeks
after three weeks of wifi-problems and sharing a room and language emersion and big cars and enormously huge paper cups of sweet tea of baseball and history of African Americans and all that and much more

what it all comes down to
after three weeks
is
it’s getting too complicated to summarize
it’s changed from a state of being somewhere to a
state of being someone
a state of having arrived and now dealing with it
and not wondering anymore about
customizing everything and even
enjoying it
and not wondering anymore about
the doors which have locks that open the other way around –
you turn the key right –
and knowing where to go and where your place is
and where not
it’s changed from a state of asking your way around
to explaining the way to other people
to a state where you know what shoe size you are
how to dial a cell phone
what it all comes down to
after three weeks
is
that nothing is black or white
and that there are always people you’ll be surfing on the same wave with
and that there is room to grow and things to find out
that what appears as naivety is optimism
and what appears as optimism is naivety all the same
that taking pride in oneself can lead to
george bush
but also to ella fitzgerald
that optimism and self-confidence make people sing and dance and become
the greatest musicians
the greatest sportsmen
the greatest thinkers
writers
researchers
but that optimism and self-confidence can be
arrogance and ignorance just as well
what it all comes down to
after three weeks
is
that people are different
everywhere
that you have to find your crowd
no matter where you are
and I have to find my crowd
no matter where I am
what it all comes down to
after three weeks
is
that it’s hard to leave a place that you’ve just gotten used to
that it’s hard to leave people that you’ve just gotten attached to
that when I asked what people think my experiences were they said
draconic liqueur laws, overbearing religious culture, - *censored* – music scene
that I’ve found my crowd

what it all comes down to after three weeks, as short a time as that might seem:
it doesn’t come down to anything
anymore
it’s become too much
it’s become part of
me

too many useless possessions will kill your karma. and: fuck sexism!

i love my credit card. finally i can spend money i do not own on things i do not need, and with the sucky dollar it is even cheaper than in europe. yaaaay.

that's why i don't count the beer i buy (by credit card of course, they won't take plus account for alcohol. i can't see why.) and that also is the reason i actually got a hardrock cafe shirt from louisville. i especially like that it does not have anything fancy printed on it, nothing like chicago or new york or madrid or such, but a place noone in europe has ever heard of. it's pinkish-purple, by the way, and after nelli explained to me that from what she has heard this colour has an interesting submeaning i'm a little worried about myself.

the last week was full of weird and interesting and well.... other things. find out for yourself:

sunday

i was wanting to work on my paper. i really was. only, other things came up. like updating this here, having breakfast, writing a 20-page letter, hanging out at starbucks, hanging out at coffea, hanging out here and there and doing some other fun though academically worthless things.

monday

i finally started reading that biography of burroughs. man, that guy was a freak. for sure he was.
the rest of labour day i actually used to work on my paper - which was: to read. our folks had returned from chicago and it was huongs birthday the next day so we of course hung out together and i was not quite as efficient as i had hoped. one week to go for the paper, right.

tuesday

i had my class. before that i must have been doing something cause my class only starts at two. i suppose i read something. after class i went to zumba and in the evening we probably did something, too, i can't remember. that's strange, cause i actually had beer, and not too little of it, the two days after, but i believe i can remember everything from those evenings... ha. that's curious. six days to go. my butt was kind of burning.

wednesday

we had a class on us civil rights which was great, after that we had our weekly meeting, which was good as well. in the morning, much too early if you ask me we had had our english as a second language class (esl) for which we had to write an essay on an article or an essay written by a guy named lawrence shanes who analyzes the usa's striving for more, bigger, higher, faster and draws a line from the history of overcoming frontiers in order to expand the countries' greatness to an economical expansion in the 20th century. his idea is (or was, the article was pretty old) that the pursuit for expansion has to do with a historically grown ideal of always getting more in order to become a happy person. my answer to this was that there's a logical error in this setting of ideals because you literally become the donkey chasing the carrot that is held in front of your nose too far for you to ever reach it. of course! that was what we had been doing tuesday night! we had to write the essay!

anyway: after our weekly meeting, which had ended at like 4:30 or so, we went over to coffea for doing homework and working on my paper (five days til buffallo....)

i ended up being frustrated because nothing would work out the way i wanted it to so i decided to ask my prof for help. i wrote an email to him, it took my about ten minutes for four sentences. well. i told him that i cannot come up with a good writing plan because of these and those reasons and what my ideas were but that i needed his help because i couldn't decide which way to go.

after that i played rommée with trevor, who is the owner or manager of coffea and whose job it is to be there and make coffee and such but when there's not that much to do he's got time to hang out with us and play cards.
i thought, i might actually get back to work after that, but i wouldn't be able to concentrate - or maybe, subconsciously, my mind wanted to hinder me from work because it is nasty and mean and it wanted so sabotage my good will.
instead i ended up going to the mellow mushroom - references to anything you might think of are not coincidental - drinking american ("import" - i swear it was not real german!) beer and playing trivia. trivia is a game where one guy asks random questions on pretty much random knowledge - who played xy in zz, who was the president who added the 14th amendment to the constitution, in which year did the beatles record norwegian wood for the first time, whatever - and every team can hand in answers to the questions. you can win fun things like 50$ credit or a free pizza. we, that was trevor and me and two german-philosophy-phd students did not win anything. i'm afraid i was completely worthless there anyway. it's a myth that we as germans know everything about american pop culture. trust me, we don't. we don't know anything.

this was a really great evening. i ended up not doing anything for anything but instead i had a great time hanging out with the guys and letting beer float through my veins, which i had missed a lot around here :)

thursday

the first half of the day i hung out at coffea trying to read the book for my class, which i managed in about three times the time i usually would have needed. the beer from the day before might have had a tiny little impact on that....

i got an answer from my prof who wrote to me that if i was a damsel in distress i should come by his office next week and he would see how he could help me.
i wrote back, well i kind of can't.
later on i would google the term and find out the following:
"damsel in distress"is a term from the british english literature theory that describes a motive that often appears in the 19th century brit lit: dumb women hanging around naively and stupidly waiting for some heroic guy to pass by and save their asses. this motive is one of the most criticized by feminist literature theory and the feminist movement in general.

now, lets think about this: a professor in a german university in the 21st century dares to write this as a reply to a female student who asked him for help based on questions with regard to the contents of a paper that is yet to be written in a major that is to an extent of 90% studied by women. amazing, isn't it?

it doesn't even matter if anything about this comparison was true, even if there was truth in it, it still simply isn't his right to say something like that. for, if i was dumb, which by the way i certainly do not believe i am, it would still be my personal cognitive disadvantage but hadn't have anything to do with my gender or sex, right? and do you think he would have likened a guy to some motive like that? i don't think so. fuck sexism!

i wrote him one more mail telling him i seriously doubted that he would have replied in the same way to a male student asking him for his help on a paper and that i'd like to put my paper off til november. i fear he won't let me so that my worst case scenario is having to redo the module, but maybe things will turn out okay. i was thinking: there's so many people walking around who are always lucky about not worrying too much about how things will turn out, why shouldn't i be just as carefree and lucky as them, right?

in the evening we went to the german house speaking to the people who live there - german majors, exchange students from g, people who just randomly speak g... and after that we went to their german stammtisch and though there were a few nice and interesting people all in all i must say, they're just not my crowd. ("hey, you know, my friend once said to me we were drinking over a thousand liters of beer a year, and i said, no, but then i started counting: well, one football game: 6 wheat beers, that's 3 liters, and this three times a week. any random party, i drink at least 30 small bottles, that's 10 liters... hahaha..... so in the end i thought he must be right... hahaha.... blablabla..")

friday

we had to get up eeeeeeearly as to go to louisville (uk's archenemy in sports, by the way) to the mohammad ali museum, which was interesting because i had not known anything much about him and now found out that he's (or was, haven't been able to figure that one out so far) an inspiring person. still i am of the opinion that many us-americans strongly overemphasize the individual influence a person has - "just work hard enough and everything will be great, you'll see. be faithful and hardworking and you'll be living a happy life" - and i still don't believe in it. also i was once more proven in my observation that in the us people tend to put a lot of pathos into presentations and that they want everything shown in movies. that's interesting. i'll tell you more about that later on maybe. and as usual, this of course does not apply to all us-americans. but i get the feeling that a vast majority of those people surrounding us here on campus are part of that.

we had lunch at the hard rock cafe, hence the shirt.
huge steak, at least 2 cms thick, and awesome! :)

after lunch we went to a baseball bat museum where we saw plenty of movies and real people (wow) showing us how baseball bats are manifactured and in fact that was interesting. we got cute little bats as a souvenir and they said we could even take them home in our checked luggage, so watch out folks, i'll be coming back armed!

the evening we spent rehearsing for our big performance at the international night tomorrow - well, that's kind of a different story, but what it comes down to: we, that would be olga, huong and me, will be singing keinen zentimeter by clueso, probably a disney song medley with german lyrics, and hit the road jack there, accompanied by guitar, of course.
we'll see how that works out...

then we were hanging out in front of coffea with erdem playing us his freshly composed... erm.. songs in helge schneider style and drinking tea, both of which were equally fun.

as of now

time is starting to fly by - only two weeks left in ky, and of course, that's always the moment when you feel like you finally got used to a place. i'm looking forward to moving on and seeing other places, but of course i start getting attached to people round here - not only our german folks, for by now, i cannot even believe that we have only been hanging out as a group for three weeks, feels more like we had been going to school together for ten years or so. but also the other cool people around here. who knows, maybe i'll end up visiting friends over here sometime sooner or later after this thing...

it's late around here, i'll be going to bed now - tomorrow is a big day: rehearsal, performance, teaching people how to play "durak"....
have a good one, people, and let me know what's going on in your lives, i'm always interested in that!

finally, reality

i was often not in a very good mood over the last week. this had to do with what I call the disco ball effect: when things are shiny and glittery and whatever kind of interesting from outside but have no substance to them, if you take a closer look at them you realize they are completely empty (“außen glänzend, innen hohl”). now, i hate that. or maybe: I just cannot deal with that. my mind, but even more so my soul, were desperately longing for substance, for something meaningful, for something real. cause always trying to spend as much plus account money as possible (they give us 40 bucks a day on our student id card which we can only spend in the restaurants on and close to campus or in the campus convenience stores that also sell t-shirts. i’m so not into campus sports merchandise, but at starbucks they do have good cds…. well, anyway: instead of just handing us some money in cash they more or less force us to spend the plus account money on useless crap.), going to classes that are – well, lets just say, a little bit… suggestive and/or weird, and spending the rest of the time reading or going to the gym just could not provide my thirsty soul with anything.

hanging out on campus all the time gave me the feeling of living in a pink bubble and i do not like living in anything burstable. i like being earthbound and staying in connection to the ground i’m walking on.
so, now starting on friday, things changed. while i was almost falling into depression on thursday, our friday excursion to the underground railroad museum really gave my soul some food. the underground railroad was a network of people who helped people escape from slavery. the exhibition gave detailed information about the history of slavery in the americas and elsewhere, the abolitionist movement, the situation of african american people ever since and many other things and all of it really touched me. looks like fate or whatever wants me to deal with those things at this time - you see, the thing is, i have also been taking a class on major black writers here, which starts with the times of frederick douglass and harriet jacobs and as such makes me deal with the history of slavery all the time. the class is one of the best classes i’ve ever had in all my college time. the professor is a young guy who fulfils all of my american stereotypes with regard to his outward appearance and is currently working on his dissertation. he seems to know everything about what is to be taught in class, i mean, literally, everything, and he teaches in a way that really makes you reflect on the conditions of those people. i’m constantly on the edge of crying when i read about slavery. not so much, because it is so sad, which it is, too. but more than anything it is a desperate outcry over the injustice in this world and of course the profitability that went along with slavery and that made it happen – the fact that people lose all their sense for solidarity and all interest in other human beings if there is power and profit to acquire. the fact, that until this very day people use the means of division to rule and conquer the world.

the museum is located in cincinnati. we only had very little chance to actually see the city, but here’s some pics for you anyway:




in the evening bliss and i went to coffea which is a coffee bar we’ve been hanging out at a lot (because they are open til midnight, they accept plus account and they make the only real tea anywhere on campus at first, but now we’ve got to know all the people who work there, too, so our reason hierarchy was slightly shifted.) there we met lujza, a writing and esl teacher who was born and raised in budapest and moved to the us eight years ago. we talked for hours and then decided to walk downtown together the next day, which we then did yesterday. lujza first took us to the art museum on campus, where they have a temporary exhibition on local folk arts and also a permanent exhibition with some very nice pieces in it. we moved on to a couple of nice little stores with in germany so called alternative clothing and a lot of great and very cheap used books as well as all kind of other things, then we went to the movie theater to see adam, which is a very sweet, very gentle and very, very good movie. the theater is kind of old-schooly, i think lujza said it used to be a stage theater but then they made a movies out of it. it is really beautiful and reminded me of russian theaters.


afterwards we checked out yet another coffee bar and went to a restaurant with good (and real!) food and live jazz. the sax player was real good and for the first time for more than a year awakened a desire in me to take out henry and blow the horn again. jazz definitely does have a different sound here compared to europe, at least compared to bremen. it flows more naturally, it seems to have some way to it that it does not have on the theaterschiff, i even liked the guitar in it.


so, after this genuine american experience we went back to coffea, found out all of us were extremely tired so we went to bed soon after that. that was a long day.

yesterday for the first time i think we got an idea of what the locals really do and how they live and where they go. this is so much more real then any campus life going on here, and this is so much more interesting and even convinced me, that living and studying here – of which they try to convince us in this fulbright program – is a cool thing worthy to be considered. thanks again for showing us reality, lujza!

baseball. horses. water ballons. natural bridge. sunday - what did we do on sunday again?!? basic leadership skills.

that's pretty much what we've been doing the last days. you must know, i'm too lazy to take pics because melisa does so all the time and i only realize i don't have any the moment i want to post them here. we've been planning to exchange them for days but, well, you know how the song goes. water ballon fight on youtube. basic leadership: see true colors.

so, baseball and horse pics to be uploaded some other time, but the natural bridge part i'll give you right away, cause that was my personal highlight in ky so far.

natural bridge is a resort park in south eastern kentucky as far as i understand (i'm not the brightest kid in the bunch when it comes to geography unless i travelled somewhere by train or car, we went by bus and i did not have to read a map...) and it's incredibly beautiful out there. they've got hiking trails which include climbing up and down a mountain (or maybe it's just a hill, but everything measures in comparison and i'm used bremen standards you know) and i guess some hotel facilities as well, at least we were at a traditional kentuckian buffet restaurant, and there's square dancing and clogging on hoedown island which we tried but failed to master.

i'll let the pics do the rest of the talking and say goodbye and good day or night or whatever time you wish with a smile and a big hug to all of you.